Israel pulled an epic self-own - and instead of breaking Iran, it’s triggered toxic fallout, oil panic and a much bigger war. Right, so Israel has spent days selling this as control, as precision, as pressure, as the kind of war those in the know can widen without losing hold of the edges, and now Tehran is sitting under toxic smoke and black rain after fuel depots and refinery-linked sites were hit, a Chinese intelligence vessel has been reported operating south of Iran in international waters near the Gulf, and footage from the video game ARMA has been circulating online as if somebody needed fake explosions to make the real ones look more convincing. That is how things are going now. Not with a neat chain of military success, but with a poisoned capital, an information war that cannot keep its trousers up, and outside powers moving closer to the scene because the fire is now big enough to pull them in. Then Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader under wartime conditions, so the leadership gap Israel and Washington plainly wanted did not open. It shut. Overnight. Just as they were told it would. With a new man in place and the whole succession question taken off the table by a formal appointment. China has not sent in divisions, nobody is pretending that, but Liaowang-1, the vessel in question is being reported south of the Iranian coast in international waters, not randomly sight-seeing, but positioned so that it’d be a war crime for the US or Israel to try the same stunt here, that they tried with that Iranian training vessel off Sri Lanka last week, and Beijing has already had its foreign ministry fielding questions about safe passage through Hormuz because Chinese trade and energy flows sit inside this war prominently, Iran being a major source of energy for them. That is what happens when you decide to turn a regional confrontation into a shipping and energy crisis though isn’t it? Other powers do not need to fire a shot to become part of the pressure.